A New Tool for Historians of the US Supreme Court

Probably all you historians of the U.S. Supreme Court already knew that the Supreme Court Database (SCDB), first created by the political scientist Harold Spaeth for the Court since 1945, has recently been extended, in the “Legacy” release, back to 1791.  Colin Starger, University of Baltimore School of Law, has recently alerted us the Free Law Project, in which he is a participant, has updated its Supreme Court Citation mapping tool to take advantage of the new data. “Interested users can create their own historical citation networks and then have complete access to all opinion text and SCDB data. To assess the potential of the tool, consult this example.  “The tool is entirely free and open source.”